Thoughts on AI art?

If anyone has earned the title of pillock, it's Shadiversity.

I think AI is only good for shitposting or when you feel like experimenting around to see what kind of bizarre stuff it can come up with.

For everything else eehhhhh nah.

Making stuff by yourself is way more fun.

Gonna be 100% honest

I was a writer that couldn't find an artist to draw my stuff. So I self taught myself to be an artist. At this point i'm just going to keep going as I'm going, i'll do my best to improve and keep drawing it myself.

It helps to explore ideas, but I'm concerned that people who can't draw or do anything creative can profit from their "works" along with artists who actually draw something. At the same time companies start to prefer AI over real people. There was a huge issue with copyright and license from the very start. I hope that this will be regulated in some way.

I feel like this video sort of touches on another frightening aspect of AI. AI filters could warp our standard of beauty to something unobtainable.

I think AI art is a little scary but it's also interesting how it mimics the human imagination and creativity. I do think that some AI art has something missing when I look at it, it just looks off to me and uninspired but it could advance in the future to where you can't tell if a human or robot made complicated pictures which scares me lol. I don't have a reason to use AI art, maybe for fun, I would rather make my own stuff and just be proud of it.

It doesn't mimick human imagination/creativity though. All it does is make a collage of data it's been fed, merging data points that have the same flag attatched to it.

I quote Brenda Blitz, she is a musician and I just read an interesting interview with her and I really
liked what she said.
I try to translate it from german to english:

creative ideas are the result of soul exploration, nightmares, hope and desire. Anger, hate and
love, fear and pain. The overstepping of taboos, the joy deconstruction, obscenity and
political consciousness. Where is the computer which has nightmares, soul and hope or
a gut with bacteria which shapes it´s abstract logic?

I recently got back from a conference where AI in art was heavily covered and debated. And I have mixed feelings about it all.

2 things I find encouraging about our situation- the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes have brought actors and writers together to reclaim the humanity in their art. AI will still be in film and television, but it won't erase people like it would have- not when people make themselves heard and are willing to fight for their living (so let's amplify their voices out of gratitude for their suffering and help mitigate others).

As artists, we have to drive the conversation too. AI is a tool, but it can't read a creative person's mind and spit out an image that lives up to it. Maybe one day, but as of now, it's just a fancy tool with a lot of hard edges. Know your worth. Advocate for yourself and your art. Fight the illegal databases (and so help me, if I see anyone say their art is less than what AI can do I will... Try to buy your comics on my VERY fixed income! You're better than robots, people! You contain multitudes!).

My day job is in packaging design for the beverage industry and I have found no evidence that AI-generative art can speed up my process yet (my God, and I really wanted it to because I had to make an illustration for one of those weird, cut up mango slices (you know, the cubist kind) for a fruit beer label and it would have saved me some time- but the robots failed me hard, y'all. All that art ended up being mine in the end with NO help from our robot overlords. But one day, AI might speed up my ideation phase for work and it might even be abstract enough where it makes a visually connection I didn't think of that my human brain and skill can then run with and make, well, human. One day maybe.

Regardless, the business trend we see coming is that AI won't replace people in the short term, but artist who knows AI will be hired over those who don't. So in the meantime, know your value as an artist and drive the conversation in the field. Let the non-creatives understand that AI is a tool and not the ONLY art solution they need.

I sat in on a session led by IBM's AI unit and they covered scenarios for artists and implored us to drive the conversation with our employers so they understand AI is just a tool and it needs to be ethically implemented so people aren't left in the dust (insert gif of human skulls being crushed by a tank from The Terminator).

(Transparency note, Daniel RKM has 3 comics staring sympathetic AI-based characters and probably can't be trusted in this debate. Insert skull-crushing Terminator tank imagery once again).

I agree with several others above, AI is a tool and can be directed to any purpose. It can make the creation of images quicker and easier. Setting aside the questionable means of achieving that, it is like our generation's version of the industrial revolution. It's not all bad, and in fact technical advancements in the past freed up humans to focus on different things.

But at what point does it cease to be a tool, and instead AI becomes a creator instead of the human? What work is required of the human for said human to get any credit? Is it enough for the human to just come up with an idea, and for the computer to make it for them?

I am not against AI as a tool, but I question where this is all heading. AI generation is basically saying, come up with something for me. It's like in computer programming, switching from imperative (telling the computer the steps to take) to declarative (telling the computer what you want). Or to make an analogy, having a magical genie that can grant your every wish. Though more efficient than doing everything yourself, and yes you still are the originator, it just seems to be undercutting the purpose of art in the first place. Business, I can see the reason, since the end result (i.e. profit) is most important. But art? Doesn't the method matter?

It's like hiring a ghost writer to make a book for you, then claiming to be the author. Maybe in general you directed the book's content, but don't you want to write it yourself? Why take away your own voice? We make robots to build cars because we don't want to do it ourselves anymore. But why make robots to speak for us? To draw for us?

Even for my web novel, I chose to pay for an artist to make the cover art, because I felt in some way that I was collaborating with another artist. In that sense, I feel like AI art is lacking by its very definition. It would be like the first version of my cover, where I just found a suitable stock photo with a mishmash of other things I wanted in it. It wasn't something I would call art. In fact, it was more for expediency, considering the amount of effort (or lack thereof) I put into it. Emulation would be a more accurate term.

It's not AI art, it's AI theft. It could not merge images together without real artists and coming up with prompts doesn't make you an artist. It's like getting a drink from a vending machine and calling yourself a Cocacola artist.

I think Ai can be helpful. However, it is important to distinguish how and where it is used. If you can't draw and an Ai lets you "draw" your pictures, you just can't be proud of these pictures. There is no personal contribution to it. In addition, Ai does not have its own drawing style. That means you'll never be able to maintain the same style. In addition, many Ai ́s use databases that are composed of stolen works by other artists. On the other hand, Ai can also be a help. If you look at Photoshop's new AI tool, it makes it a lot easier, especially in the photography sector. Without resorting to stolen works. Chatbots can also be a help. For example, if you are stuck in a dialogue while writing, you can try to recreate it and continue it logically. Again, you should note that not all bots can do the same thing and not all have clean databases. I see the whole thing with mixed feelings. Yes, Ai can help. But you shouldn't leave everything to her. You can tell too much when an artist relies too much on Ai.

Listening to people say they always struggled with art, but were always interested in it. And now, thanks to AI, they can finally be creatively fulfilled, makes me wanna vomit.
I struggle with cooking, but now, with uber, I can finally feel like a real chef when the food is delivered to my doorstep? blargh
like... uh.. work for it people. I can't wait for the entitlement in coming generations to increase to even more extreme levels.

I always make the " these AI advocates probably think ordering food online makes them a chef" analogy.

I actually tried out bing "create" recently out of morbid curiousity and I felt nothing but emptiness.
I always feel good art requires challenging.
There's always fulfillment in that.
AI is devoid of those ingredients.

What about the entitlement from the art community? All of the "scams" that I've heard of linked with AI art have been perpetuated by actual "artists". They're the ones entering art contests and trying to sell it as their own. I work with a lot of authors who've used AI for their book covers - no one EVER claims that they were the artist. They simply say "I made this using AI."

Or what about the fact that artists think they're entitled to commissions? A lot of writers I know would much rather use human-designed content for our covers. But it's just not an option for many of us. We can buy subscriptions to royalty photo sites and then turn around see the same art on royalty-free sites. We run a super-high risk of getting copyright claimed no matter which site we use. Not to mention the fact that we're also at a high risk of being cheated by the human artists that we came to in good faith.

The risk of scams is also on top of the stress of searching through writing, marketing, editing, revising their work, finding an artist who is talented enough to bring their vision to life and who is also professional enough to finish the project. If the project doesn't go swimmingly well, we're stuck paying an exorbitant amount of money for an image we can't use. If we can't use the image to help sell our work, it means that we can't afford to invest money back into the art world.

So in short, I would rather use an AI art generator to get exactly what I want and be free and clear to use it, than try to fight a human artist to give me what I want. *And before anyone says it - a LOT of AI art generators have limited their categories to different art styles such as comic hero, fantasy, photo, etc and are paying artists a license to use their styles and won't generate from copyrighted material. There will always be art theft but it's always going to be human-led, not AI-led

Just get the cover artist to sign a contract, where it explicitly states they grant you the copyright for the cover. The fee is their compensation for it.

Having bad experiences with shitty people is still no excuse to use AI in my opinion.